I think this is the first of Frederick's poems that I have
read with interest all the way through.



Douglas Clark, Bath, England           mailto: [log in to unmask]
Lynx: Poetry from Bath  ..........  http://www.bath.ac.uk/~exxdgdc/lynx.html

On Thu, 25 Jul 2002, Frederick Pollack wrote:

> Eleusis
> 
> 
> 1
> 
> The city is built of speech-acts.
> The part of a moment the mind admits, 
> the automatic choice of a role to play
> within it, and the words it makes one say: 
> one brick.  There was a gambit
> I don't often hear now - repeating
> whatever the mark says as if
> uncomprehendingly, or asking
> fake-Socratic questions about his assumptions,
> making him feel an idiot …
> it was more British than American,
> but I've encountered it.
> More characteristic
> is our gentle, even heartbroken "I don't agree" -
> spoken as if you'll break your heart or pee
> your pants because he doesn't
> and the community, implicitly, won't.  It is a tactic 
> of soft males.  The truly aggressive
> Don't Take No for an Answer, Get to Yes,
> use "power" as an adjective, derive
> from some salesman a century ago:
> Henry Adams' dynamo.  Are copied by
> the scripts read by telemarketers
> in their desperate monotone, hurrying over words
> they don't get - grey rooms full
> of underclass, or recent immigrants,
> fighting the clock, condemned by computers,
> aping the heroic autonomous self.
> Which is better imitated,
> though to no greater effect (I slam the phone
> on one, edge away from the other),
> by libertarians, whose praise of the market
> honors their own
> inexorable rightness, sleepwalker alertness.
> Forever victorious losers -
> in which they resemble their allies,
> the fundamentalists, whose cleverness is that 
> of Jesus.  Real power-holders 
> (I'm not referring 
> to politicians) don't need to argue 
> (especially not with me) or even talk;
> their simulacrum of speech,
> reluctant, defensive as squid's ink,
> creates a calming hum, like that of death. -
> Forgive my harping on voices and contexts
> whose overlapping echoes drown
> me out, except on paper where 
> I ask myself whether
> I too am echo.  They are my equivalent 
> of meadows and wildflowers,
> the ahistorical themes of lesser poets.
> 
> 
> 2
> 
> O fascist song, you thump through my heart
> despite and beyond shame.
> *Face to the sun, raise the banners*,
> my own blood spurts from my knife!
> As our column, in dusty black, crosses
> the black mud of fields
> towards a village whose women 
> from earliest girlhood wear
> a black as black as their eyes
> and lightless windows, I wonder: 
> why *this uniform?  This stupidity, 
> when there are others more congenial?
> If the old saw is true
> that a sufficiently advanced technology
> is indistinguishable from magic, perhaps the obverse
> is that spirituality
> is obsolescence.  
> Bone needles, stone tools the most profound …
> These telegraph poles black against the sky,
> cut wires, meager lamps: what I deserve.
> The only radio 
> is in the house of the cruel 
> landlord, where we are billeted.
> We listen to the vivid threats and dreams,
> weird humor, sudden arcless flights
> of our leader,
> adoring every miserable word.  
> In the morning I arrest
> the town's intellectual.
> I know him by his tweeds and terror
> and again think: why this side
> of a stinking cell?  Why am I armed
> with something more than noble
> whining for right and justice,
> or reason spitting out its teeth?
> It isn't until evening
> when the priest makes his blessing
> and we march from a pyre
> of books, still smouldering with
> a corpse at its center,
> that I realize: *metaphor -
> the grownup form of "It's all a dream."
> *You are doomed to carve your meaning
> in the flesh of others.*
> 
> 
> 3
> 
> Poets who write about poetry (theirs, 
> someone else's, the abstraction) seem 
> to want to subsume themselves
> to something of worth, but at a deeper level
> they're in denial -
> denying the unimportance of their art.  
> Paradoxically, the same is true of rivals
> who only write about their traumas.  For who 
> will blame them?  It would be too cruel
> to say that this father, cancer, rape
> or adventure with God is boring.  
> And so what either type achieves -
> the first with pseudo-tradition,
> the second with mumbled horror or longing,
> amidst late capitalism's structural detestation
> of anything unfrangible - is consolation,
> which they pretend to whisper to the world
> while arranging matters
> so that the world whispers it to them.
> That's why nobody reads poetry.  
> Because one thing you can say about the masses
> is that they don't want to console anyone.
> 
> In any event, the last book of poems
> I bought was *The World's Wife* 
> by Carol Ann Duffy.  Brit - and 
> unlikely therefore to equate
> syntax with patriarchy
> or criticism with poetry (except in the crude
> way I am, here),
> or think there's any diction beyond wit.
> A set of dramatic monologues
> by Mrs. Freud, Mrs. Satan, Mrs. King Kong, etc.
> And every one resentful -
> resentful-vengeful, resentful-triumphant,
> etc.  The one that struck me
> is by Eurydice.
> She doesn't want to leave
> hell.  It's decided without
> her input.  On the climb, she does everything
> she can to make him turn around.
> Finally, in her sweetest voice she says
> how excellent was the poem he read
> back there.  "Did you think so?": he,
> smiling, wheeling.  She waves and is gone. -
> Feminists have told me
> I take things like this too seriously.
> (Of course, if you don't take them seriously … )
> 
> My own take on the myth
> is that Orpheus never turns.
> They reach the surface
> through a cave in barren mountains,
> which they find gushing and blooming.
> And spring lasts, dispelling 
> winter, absorbing summer, 
> so that the point of the myth 
> (in fact, of every myth)
> and hell itself are lost. 
> He never turns, although he wants to - wants
> to check on her because he loves her, fears
> the treachery of hell will take her, and,
> absurdly, that she somehow prefers death.
> Also, he doesn't like walking ahead
> like some fool traditionalist.
> Yet in the steep, apparently endless caverns,
> he is happy, he wants only
> to return her to life -
> even if he can't see her,
> even if they can't touch
> and must bear their unshared thoughts into the sunlight.
> 
> 
> 4
> 
> In Lyon, the passages
> between and under
> sixteenth-century buildings -
> Huguenots, smugglers, Blanquists, *résistance.
> I didn't see them.  Was changing trains,
> reading the guidebook.  *Ville mystérieuse*.
> Watching the sun gild the beaux-arts municipal dumplings 
> beside the Rhone.  
> Yet in stories since, having established 
> my listener was never there, I crawl through them,
> the only foreigner in that tour
> (and, I notice, the only single).
> Abraded motley walls,
> grit underfoot, shadows.
> They recall the wormholes I court in poems,
> tunnels that opened
> in third grade
> in the air after school as I fled.
> There shrouded figures handed me a sword
> and swore me to lifelong hatred (which was easy),
> but also to some maturer-sounding purpose;
> then raised a cheer for me from spectral comrades.
> I was flattered less by the attention
> than the absence of bullshit -
> about enemies and solitude, of course,
> but also about secrets.
> How some remain when told.
> 
> 
> 5
> 
> In the history of television,
> the program nearest my sensibility
> was an absurd documentary
> about the Eleusinian Mysteries:
> Michael Wood trying to trace the Sacred Way
> from Athens to Eleusis
> through bus stops, tenements, tumbledown chapels, garages,
> thistles.  Wheels of column amidst crap.
> He looked frayed
> by the time he got to the site, with its labeled fragments,
> and somewhat despairing but game -
> as if two thousand years
> had proved unexpectedly obstinate, but 
> perhaps a way could still be found around them.
> I can understand that.
> It works, or doesn't, the other way 
> also.  To the year 4000, fraternal greetings.
> 
> One morning, we gather at a lot,
> carpooling, riding in on buses.  People
> who walked have been sitting here for days,
> protest a porta-potty shortage.  It's still
> before dawn; in the scrubby trees, crows scold.  
> We start off raggedly
> towards sunrise.  Helicopters circle;
> cops try to herd us to
> the shoulder.  Nice-smelling reporters
> get in our faces during breaks.
> They see every embarrassingly antiquated 
> stereotype of "rebellion":
> matrons who suddenly worship anything;
> sage-bearded, passive-aggressive ecstatics;
> earnestly, shrilly explaining youths.
> Only the placards are gone, which alone 
> gave us meaning.  By now, what could they say?
> 
> The day is already hot, the spring weather
> like deadliest summer, as winter resembled 
> sinister spring.  But the crowd
> refuses to drag, remains hydrated
> and vocal.  Issues: the validity, 
> even the coherence
> of worrying about the "self" or "soul," as opposed 
> to "larger" discourses.  What is to
> be done. - Jews and lapsed Catholics  
> find each other, that pillar-dyad.  
> Gays monotonize to talk with straights.  
> There are numinous, brief interracial exchanges
> and multicultural contacts; remarks so brilliant
> I'm unsure if I've overheard or wishfully
> projected them; and as always, nothing pertinent or whole.
> 
> My wife, who endures heat and
> "spirituality" better than I 
> (her skepticism is deeper 
> though unadmitted), takes
> a long suck from our bottle, 
> smears sunblock on my nose and brow and says
> (in that way no one awkward can hear) 
> that she's glad to be on this march with me, but amazed
> I'd lend myself to something so …
> What?  Communal? frantic? gestural? 
> "So religious," she says. -
> It isn't.  I try to explain 
> and find I can't, but she's satisfied.
> 
> And we end, not at a cave-mouth
> that leads below ground 
> to a sacred sheaf of wheat,
> some sort of ergot derivative,
> and oil-light, but at another parking lot
> (they're convenient staging areas),
> wider than where we started,
> ringed with larger dumpsters.  
> Some join their sweaty hands and sing, 
> painfully.  Some sway like Orthodox, 
> alone, but without the rhythm, 
> reciting only their lives.  
> I'm one of those.  I may stop joking here.
> I think that's the point of the poem
> conceived this burnt and wounded solstice.
> More than the year turns.  More than earth revives.
>